No, not the future queen's socially upwardly mobile little sister, but the considerably more entertaining (from my point of view) Pippa Greenwood. I think that Pippa is wonderful. When presented with some diseased piece of vegetation on Gardeners' Question Time she always sounds so genuinely happy and excited, and she really knows her stuff. I thought it was a great shame when she ceased to appear on Gardeners' World. I like to feel that my TV gardening experts know a lot more than I do, and I admire Pippa's zest for life.
She was talking at one of the local garden clubs. I've talked there myself this year, twice. Once booked well in advance to talk about the woodland charity, and also to talk about gardening, which was booked at slightly short notice after I'd already signed up to do the other. I think they must have had a problem with another speaker, and been keen to find someone to complete the programme, and I was local. Fortunately both talks went well, though I can't think they'd normally choose to have the same speaker twice in one year. When I saw that Pippa Greenwood was due to appear I asked if the meeting was open to non-members, and they said it was, and then sent me a complimentary ticket. I'd been fully expecting to buy a ticket in the normal way, and was very touched by the gesture.
I arrived at the village hall with a quarter of an hour to spare, and found the car park was already full. We'd thought the capacity of the hall might be greater than that of the car park, so that wasn't a total surprise. I parked down the lane, found myself a seat towards the back but with a perfectly good view, and was sitting there happily when the committee member who books speakers told me that there was space at the front, and so I found myself with a front row ringside seat tucked between two members of the committee.
Pippa made plant diseases sound very entertaining, and told me some things I didn't know or had forgotten about diseases I'd heard of, as well as introducing me to a couple of diseases I hadn't come across at all. Camellia gall looks exciting, producing large swellings on the shoots, the size of a human hand, which apparently feel cold, damp and unpleasantly yielding to the touch. It doesn't harm the plant, and probably won't recur the following year, so is not the worst thing you could get in your garden. Azalea gall is similar but slightly less revolting.
I'm not good at treating most plant diseases, disliking using chemicals and tending towards the low intervention method of trying to grow the plant well in the first place, removing the damaged bits if it succumbs, and binning the whole thing if it doesn't recover. I sometimes feel inadequate at work when customers ask for advice on buying chemicals. Pippa's approach turned out to be similar to mine, so naturally I felt that she was even more wonderful than I had thought. She suggested using crushed oyster shells as a mulch to discourage slugs and snails from pots, and advised us that the cheapest place to get them was from a poultry feed supplier, not a garden centre. That's a tip I'll bear in mind, though not for acid lovers. (I once found an identifiable piece of oyster shell in the mushroom compost, so that must be what they use to sweeten the mix).
I was interested to note that Pippa still uses acetate slides, not digital ones. Some of the images dated from her time (eleven years and three days, as she told us) working as a plant pathologist at Wisley, and I guess they might be difficult to replace now that she isn't working there, though I'd have thought the RHS would be happy to help her out in the interests of public education. It made me appreciate that my woodland charity digital projector running off a memory stick is still quite advanced. Pippa's lecturing technique is to pile in a lot of information, arranged clearly, on how to identify each disease, what to do about it, and how serious it is in terms of its effect of plant health and persistence in the garden, interposed with breathing spaces in which she told some genuinely funny stories still pertaining to the subject of plant disease. It was a skilled performance, all the more so for managing to look natural.
It was a gala evening for the garden club. The club officer presiding over the proceedings had put on heels and a smart skirt, and there were nibbles afterwards. What with my having done my own talks there, plus meeting people through work when they're shopping at the plant centre, plus knowing the beekeeper who introduced me to the club in the first place, I found I had lots of people to talk to, despite not being a member of the club or living in the village. All in all it was great fun.
I don't suppose I am likely to ever meet the other Pippa, which is just as well, since I can't imagine what we'd find in common to talk about, but I remain a devoted fan of the gardening Pippa.
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